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TaskRabbit online marketplace for chores and errands arrives in the UK

Silicon Valley startup TaskRabbit has launched in the UK, meaning you can now hire someone to do all the chores and errands you have been putting off for ages, or simply don't want to do.

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The company was founded in 2008 by Leah and Kevin Busque, who were on their way out to dinner when they realised they didn't have any food to feed their golden labrador. Not wanting to miss their restaurant reservation, they came up with a business idea that revolved around paying someone online to come and do the things that they didn't have time to.

Five years on, the company operates in 19 US cities and there are 20,000 "taskers" who provide all manner of services, and TaskRabbit's dedicated UK website is now live. "Ultimately our goal is to help people outsource the things that they can, so that they can focus on the things that they love," says TaskRabbit COO Stacy Brown-Philpot told Wired.co.uk. "We are excited to be in London -- it's our first international market. After going to 19 cities in the US, we looked at where's the market that has the highest demand. You look at all the international markets, and London is at the top of the list, so we said let's just go there and make this market successful."

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In the UK there will initially be three categories of tasks people can request help with -- cleaning, DIY and Christmas tasks.

The service is currently only available in London and currently there are around 50 taskers registered to provide their skills and services.

The company did its research and asked almost 3,000 British people what sort of service they'd like. Three out of four said they wished they had more time in the day and 25 percent said their relationships would be better if they could outsource more of the chores they had to do. As such the London service has been tailored so that you can find a tasker within 40 minutes in one of those categories who will commit to doing a task for you.

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Anyone that wants to become a tasker needs to go through a full vetting process, including full fraud and terrorism investigations and face-to-face interviews. After that they go through two days of training. "The training teaches them about TaskRabbit, how our services work, what we expect of them, the kind of service we expect them to provide every client no matter what, then we set some rules and principles around themselves, how they should govern themselves, what are the policies and procedures they should comply with," says Brown-Philpot.

Our ideal user or client is the busy professional and that person is typically a woman, is married or has children, and just has negative hours in the dayStacy Brown-Philpot, TaskRabbit

Following the training there is a small test, and those who pass can become taskers and put themselves forward to help people out.

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Taskers range from freelancers who might only work part of the year, to stay-at-home parents who might want to earn extra income.

Each tasker sets their own rates, which you will agree to prior to receiving their help. You'll only pay once the task is done and the transaction takes place online. "Our ideal user or client is the busy professional and that person is typically a woman, is married or has children, and just has negative hours in the day," says Brown-Philpot, who herself is mother to a two-year-old girl and uses TaskRabbit herself. "My most recent task was I went to Croatia on holiday, and I hired a tasker to help me plan the trip. So I found somebody and I paid them some money to organise everything. It was an eight-day trip covering the entire country. I had a six-page PDF, which was my itinerary and I just showed up at the airport and went. It was amazing."

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You can't find anyone in the UK to organise your holiday for you just yet, but that could easily change over time. "In terms of other categories, we're really going to let the market tell us what they want next. So we're going to start with those three, and then expand beyond that on demand. Demand also helps us figure out which markets we go to after London. Other big cities like Manchester and Leeds and Birmingham are large markets that we want to go after next, because we want to be in all of the UK."

Following its expansion into the UK, TaskRabbit has its sights set on the rest of the Europe too. Paris, which "ranks very high in terms of demand", will likely be next.

Brown-Philpot moved to TaskRabbit from Google, where she had been for nine years and had watched the company grow from 1,000 people to 38,000 people. After observing this phenomenal global growth, she says, she felt "just ready to do that again". "I'm a mission-driven person, so the big mission of helping people live a better life and do things more efficiently excited me enough to leave Google."

Coincidentally, Google launched an online-only TaskRabbit-type service a couple of weeks ago in the form of Helpouts, whereby users can pay people to join them in a Google Hangout and give them help, tuition and advice on all manner of subjects. Both services are symbolic, no doubt of a shift towards online companies -- of which AirBnB is another obvious example -- acting as enablers, rather than providers. Brown-Philpot believes the company is bringing something unique to this trust-based, ratings culture. "TaskRabbit's a pioneer, in that you could argue that your most valuable asset is your time, and we're allowing you to use your most valuable asset," she says. "For some people it's under-utilised -- for example freelancers have a lot of time and it's under-utilised, and me as a mum, I have no time and I need help. This is the platform that's allowing people to share their most valuable asset."